Reflection of Joy (July 6th, 1997)

The author & poetic company on his 20th birthday July 6th 1997, from left-to right, David "I've always been there for you, man" Hale; Brooke "I forget yer' last name now that yer' married" Ferraro; Matt; Margot Wllard; Patrick "The Great" Mullowney, the copper-headed author; Misty Gardens; Goth Dan; Precocious Stephanie. Bottom row Alexis (now dr.) Jordan...Summer of 1997 and everything is new and exciting and your whole life is ahead of you boy.... Pure Joy...

Just 120 whisked calendar months ago I spent the sweltering heat of July1997 stationed in front of the jutting metallic tongue of the cash register at B. Dalton Booksellers, inside the rattling central air conditioning of the mall, routinely scanning the bar codes for mass market and paper back bestsellers, fueling up on caffeine and cigarettes, staring at the lazy heliotrope of a summer sun at dusk wildly contemplating how it must feel at the end of the day to write fiction for a living, to crack into the white dry-wall of the page every morning splattering the bulk of each page with continents and splotches of lettered shadows the way dawn breaks into planet, with peach-hued blinks and splashes of nectarine from the pink-eyed east and then vision and then sight.

It was ten years ago to the day. Bill Clinton was seven months into his second term as president, nocturnally drooling over a young intern by the name of Monica. The Bulls had just won their fifth NBA championship in seven years. Logging on to the static sunrise of cyberspace entailed ten minutes of rickety white noise followed by a gulping modem tittering warble followed by more pauses and frustration and password changes and verbal "fuck-it's." It was possible ten years ago to walk fifty meters across any random populated area in the United States and not find yourself being surrounded by a swarm of human beings each with their neck tilted into their collar bones droning mantras of materialism across a dimension of wirelessness.


Ten years ago a pack of cigarettes and a gallon of gas were under two dollars each respectively.

The dual steel tendrils of the World Trade Center stood tall as an intractable testament to consumerism and culture--on early mornings if viewed from cross-town resembled a two fingered sign heralding the promise of peace.


Ten years ago Princess Di was traveling the world, squeezing the hands of victims with HIV, visiting land-mine amputees in third world countries finalizing a romantic weekend in Paris come the end of the following month.

It was the summer I dyed my hair blonde with a little help from my best friend David Hale's sister Becky, who read the directions off the side of the box in her garish high-pitched nasal din as I genuflected both knees in front of the bath tub as if in prayer bowing my neck and head into the linoleum basin as if grieving over something lost. It was the summer we drove around lost without an atlas listening to monorail techno elevator muzak of Moby and the sweet gruff guitar chords of Ani Difranco, driving through country roads, fast, smoking cigarettes not knowing where we were going but succumbing to the overall golden often Kerouac-inflicted feeling inside that we there already--that our destination and overall purpose in life had something to do the fact that we were pulsating, that we were thriving, that we were driving down the gold sprinkled dust of country roads flanked on both sides by thick emerald staffs of corn.


That we are here.

The summer of hemp necklaces and cigarette ashes. the summer I saw CHASING AMY
six times in the theatre (cackling aloud during the lesbian make out scene when two elderly crones walked out, seemingly appalled) . The summer of multifarious late night viewings of Pulp fiction and Linklater's finest and Dead Poets Society The summer of clove cigarettes and french kisses when your eyes wisp open in medias embrace only to espy her forehead and eyes hushed like petals, the bulbs of her eyes backstroking behind the pink cave of their lids, as if part of her body is wadding in a pool of emotion and that somehow your lips keeping her balanced...keeping her afloat.... the elongated interim between 19 and 21 when the bars are elusive and you find yourself loafing in coffee houses bent over a splattered corpse of opened notebooks fraught with inky veins and metaphorical arteries--the battered french fry poems of youth, trying to make sense of your life by laying tracks of words together and then reading them aloud--certain of your genius, certain of your place in life.

The summer of Walt Whitman and Hesse and Jack Kerouac, always reading, always seeking, always staring into the alphabetical pond of the page and hoping to see my reflection peeking up towards me. The summer I lugged the technicolor bound travel-luggage sized INFINITE JEST with me every where I went--as if it were a concordance for postmodern scripture. And James Joyce. And Nabokov. Writers I was sure would teach me. Writers I was sure would help me grow.


Ten years ago today was a Sunday. I arrived at the bookstore and hour and a half earlier to open up, balancing the cash registers with the papery green shingles that somehow sadly dictates our existence and place in life. I wore a tie to work and sweated in the July heat, even though the mall where my bookshop was located was heavily air conditioned. Although my profession was books, it was still basic retail--still bartering over priced commodities, still catering to the financially endowed caprices of the consumer. Still toadying up to strangers to coerce them to purchase something that don't really need so that our store could reach its corporate quota and that I would still be employed.

Memory is like a long elongated red carpet kicked from the side from a celebrity limousine like a tongue. So when I reminiscence ten years into the stream of yesterday I can see myself on that day, coming home from work, stopping off for coffee at Starbucks, arriving home, thumbing loose the constrictive pentagon from beneath my chin into two uneven jet streams of silk.

I see myself now, a decade past expired, arriving home in the Buick that would be stolen two months later, standing behind the shoulders and occiput of the brassy headed lad who ten years ago arrived at the cement lip of the house where he was conceived to celebrate twenty years on this planet with family and friends and with people he loves. The oxygen and residue of memory illuminate those whose bodies have failed them like a spotlight. When I enter the sylvan french doors of my old living room (the house where Swissy-Missy ironically lives in now) and if I squint past the back of my own twenty year old head I visually discern the acrylic wig of my grandmother is sporting, her sweet breath and cigarette paper white skin, oblivious that the cancer will reel her from all of us in a little over a year. I can see my mom, her hair darker and spumed into a gelled perm. I can smell and hear the scent of our family schnauzer Lady (deceased) snapping her grainy goatee when my friends enter the living room.

I can see my father. His beard and bespectacled scent humbly nodding at my bohemian friends bartering witticisms and artistic anarchy and small talk. The beautiful beard of my father--the twenty year old wannabe writer, completely oblivious that the he will spend the bulk of the preceding decade of his life with the bone architecture of his father underground, decaying--his spirit and humility and generosity still resonating. Still singing.

This is life ten years ago. Patrick Mullowney, my playwright friend from NYU is telling anyone who will listen about the play he is composing. David Hale is romping around the living room laughing with heavily accented yawps. Sprite sized Aleixis is playing with my dog. There is Goth Dan who is sitting in the corner, nodding, trying to put on a Sisters of Mercy Cd. There is Misty Gardens who studies philosophy and ebullient lilly-eyed Stephanie who is a sophomore at IMSA.

They have all come to celebrate.


Misty clanks shut the bathroom door to change out of her work clothes. Two weekends ago Misty and I watched the dip of the June sunset lower itself into the manhole of the western sky together. We had driven in the country after work chain smoking and talking about part time jobs and life. We kissed and held each other in our underwear as thick barges of drizzling ionized light slowly dwindled into copper and then into tint and then into crickets and stars. Misty is leaving for Campaign in a month and has made it very clear that dating seriously is out of the question. For our own good.

Hale, being the jovial best friend he is, has made it lucidly clear that since things with myself and Misty are moot for the remainder of the summer he plans on stepping in and showing Misty what a real David tastes like. Laughing afterwards in his thumping guffaw, asking myself if impotency has set in on the genesis of my new year. When I mention to Hale that Misty isn't into having anything serious, she is just looking to have a good time Hale flashes a smile, echoes out his signature whew-hoo and tells me straight up that he thinks he has just met the woman of his dreams.

More friends continue to wend their way into the living room where I took my first steps. There is Matt and Brooke whose face is so white and gorgeous that is looks like a tear fallen from the socket of a china doll. And then there is Margot, the women I have been pursuing since Misty Gardens, entering the door, smiling.

Later that night in celebration we smash tables together at the coffee shop we congregate on a daily basis. There is a freight train full of Bohemians and witt. patrick Mullowney's laughter is ricocheting around the restaurant. Hale is smoking a pipe, leaning perilously close to Misty's shoulder watching her face blush in laughter after every retort.

There are clove cigarette and there are endless carafes of coffee. When my friends inquire about my birthday I blather off puddles of poetic dross. I quote Milton's How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth. I plagiarize Charles Highway, the uppity smart-ass protagonist in Martin Amis' THE RACHEL PAPERS, quoting how 20 may not be the beginning of adulthood but it irreparably constitutes the end of youth.

Looking back now, ten years, I see a sea of joy, the laughing heads of those I love all stationed around smashed together at a table at our favorite coffeehouse that was torn down six years ago. I think about the potential and the love and the yearning and the future each individual seated around me, swathed in a plume of smoke, thought that he or she might inherit.

I think about the people I have lost in the last ten years. I think about holding my fathers hands on his death bed, singing Lutheran hymns to my grandmother in her last hours.

I think about love and the women I have loved. The ones that have hurt me and the ones I live with every day and the ones who fill me and complete some part of me.

Looking back at the congregation of young hedonists and artists, I turn my head now and think about the next ten years. There will be loss and hurt and pain.

There will be death and seperation and arguements that seem so fucking signficant at the time that will later transition into pettiness....

But there will also be laughter. and growth.... and Love....

and plenty of wished for joy in the narrative song.

the writer age ten (tanned)

Requiem for Coach Ricca (pt 1)

There is perhaps no greater monosyllabic word in the English language connoting such solemn respect and veneration among the heterosexual north American ESPN-sports saturated cheap domestic beer beast renown throughout the planet as the male species than that of the word Coach. You can feel the towering respect such a word carries with it as you bite down into the side of your cheeks prior to its pronunciation, your lips forming what looks like triangular offense as your tongue lunges stagnant near the sky dome of your mouth, a raw breeze of sound kicking it's way out from the locker room of your lips, like a homecoming football team locomoting it's way on to the field, the final "ch" sound mirroring the foaming chant of a highschool stadium Friday nights in late autumn under stalks of stadium light and a brisk dip in the temperature.

Coach.

The sideline silhouette. The clipboard. The stop watch. The whistle. The stoic-chinned countenance demanding both respect and results. The flashed look of seriousness or disappointment expressed from the distance of the court or field. The spewed mantras of seasonal performance expectations and self-goals. The one individual whose status will marshal your talent, fledged your attributes into accolades and sweat the living sin out from your brow. The one individual who will coerce your anatomy into pushing itself past the mental hurdle of what you thought was possible.

The Vince Lombardi's. The Coach K's. The no-non-shit antics of Scott Skiles (I have a photo of Scott Skiles scowling at me from above the metaphysical bleachers of my writing desk; the words NO-SICK DAYS NO NON-SHIT....GET TO WORK BOY!!! etched above.)

The thick lipped Charlies Wies' and implacable Bobby Knights.

The one individual who will create you. The individual who will immortalize you. The individual who will lead you to glory and weld you into the man of character you were destined to somehow become.

The one who will lead you into the sun.

COACH.

***

The first half of my life I was an athlete. I ran seventy miles a week, my coltish limbs kicking a blurred cycle of motion beneath my torso as both my arms formed tight right angles gliding into a steady sprint, coursing the curtain call of my puberty and early-adolescence in a weighted series of quickly snapped footsteps and exhaled pants as I jetted across the topography of my youth in a steady gallop of limbs and arms skiing past the grandiose thick eye-lash windexed houses of Moss Avenue, residue from a bootleg era, sprinting around the coiffed perimeter of Madison golf course careful to avoid the lumbering silhouettes of late-middle aged golfers lugging their stalks of clubs like a fresh kill. I ran circles around the affluent timed sprinkler lawns of West Peoria, each street guarded with a sentinel of mini-vans and the chiropractic spines of basketball hoops. I ran through the gangsta-graffiti'd flotsam and jetsam of the south side, unaware that the thirty seconds it took to dip down the hilly gravel slope of either Western or Ligonier served as a sociological fissure, an arbiter of class and status discerning if you would make it in this world or if not. I ran through the leafy foliage of Bradley park, the golden timeless leaves in autumn breezing behind the back heel of my stride in a flurry of wisped crunches, across the Chinese bridge, the cratered amphitheater barren of it's summer stock tent come the genesis of fall, when high-school students don jerseys and flimsy shorts and cleats after class and take to the hard soil of the earth, a herd of athletes all running cross-country, all roving their feet over the scalp of the planet, accumulating the velocity to push harder, to run faster to quash the blinking hyphenated digits of the clock at the finish line: to pour out simply what is inside of you and find out what is left.

And then pour that out too in a draught of sacrifice and sweat.

My father ran for leisure, noncompetively. He ran everyday after standing in front of fourth graders. He boasted a waddle to his run and always ran with a demure smile sketched into his face. When I was real young I would run with my father. I remember my father pretending to have invisible buttons on the top of his curved fist he would press, making jet engine thruster sounds, claiming that they were accelerators and could make him run faster near the end of the finish line. One of the joys of my dad (as my sister Jenn pointed out in his eulogy) was that, near the end of the finish line when we were young and he would run with us, he would always let his young kids take the lead and finish ahead of him.

An emotional memory for me was dad, telling his eight year old son during the half-way point turn around of their four mile route was that, "Every step after this gets you a little bit closer to home, son. Just a little bit closer to home."

Running was deeply seeped in the blood type of our family genes. Our summer weekends were monopolized chartering the family station wagon wending our way through the arteries of Illinois highways hitting up a variety of mid-summer festival road races peppered across the state, accompanied usually with my Aunt and Uncle and their four slim tanned daughters--all boobless and lanky and all runners. My Uncle ran marathons and was a beast in local 5k's. I can remember running my first four mile race when I was in second grade. By the time I was ten I could run a six minute mile. By the time I graduated from eighth grade I was on the verge of breaking the junior high elusive five minute mile and was the second fastest miler in the state for my age.

I played baseball and Tennis during the summer. Laced up cleats and swatted around a soccer ball employing only the symmetry of the lower portion of my body in the spring and fall. Stayed late after school and worked on draining my free throws in the winter. But it was running where I had my gift. It would be the twin stems of my legs that would ferry me into the future as an athlete. The bone and tissue and muscle of my interior leg and thighs served as my promising rod and staff into a heralding future of promise. The crack of my ankles in the early morning--the rote machinery of my torso, the lapsed rhythm of my breath, the feeling of sweat trickling down my brow--the feeling of pushing yourself past a interior-manacled barrier of what you thought was impossible.

***

I met Coach Ricca the summer of 1992, exactly half my lifetime ago. I had just graduated from eighth grade. My individual mile time averaged out near the low five minute single digit area code. I ran three times a day. A three mile skid in the morning. A vigorous hill workout under the hammer of midday sun at noon. And a pleasant 4-6 mile trod at night. I kept tallies of my daily workout evaluations, performed squats and dips in my bedroom to the music of Guns-n-roses and Nirvana, plastered note cards heralding never give up maxims all over my bedroom wall. I can still remember how the earth felt that summer and spring. Can still remember the grainy taste of caffeine splashed inside my lips, trying to be more adult and not scowl at the then revolting taste. I remember the the cool melody of the sky at 5:30 in the morning when pastel shades of light pink drip into a morning haze of copper in the east when street lamps fizzle into a pre-dawn hush as I kicked my way into the future scaling the latitude and longitude of the city that had reared me for the first decade and a half of my life. It was the summer of the '92 Barcelona Olympics. I pushed myself harder. Poetically plotted how I would seduce fellow precocious Olympian Kim Zmeskal (it was hard to write a poem that rhymes with her last name). I mapped out a trajectory of personal goals set for myself over the next four years; how I would be damned if I wasn't a world class athlete. If I wasn't employing the calcium of my bones to their optimal capacity I simply did not wish to be.

At night I capitulated to the caps of both my knees, the dual bony knobs functioning as joints for the plants of my legs; the vessels that would ferry me in my quest for glory. I prayed with the fervor of saints angels that my own biased waspish variation of a God would assist the fuck out of me.

It was that summer I met Coach Ricca.

The ten individuals who have changed my life--An invocation to the dance

Since I'm hitting the big three-oh (big free throw) in a couple of weeks I thought I'd brush off the dashboard dust from ye ol' blogger, pour myself something frothy and extremely alcoholic and pelt out a few spangled stanza's of joy acknowledging through the spilled linguistic medium of alphabetical shapes clanged together in a chronicle of sound a series of devoted bloggs gift wrapped and delivered from the anvil of my heart to the geometrical static of the computer screen offering the awakened eyelids of the pithy reader a tithed hymn of gratitude and thanks dedicated solely to the ten individuals who have changed my life--individuals who have altered my periphery and augmented my perspective of beingness on this cosmically shared cruise ship (yet uniquely solitary interior-skin rattling existential and sometimes often lonely as fuck) sojourn around the sun--the experience of living life on the veritable skin and habitable scalp in this particular time and space in the discourse and gestation of this planet.

(an earthly skin which may be, sadly peeled bald, riddled with global warming legions in lieu of seasons by the time my life is doubled)

Thirty-fucking years. I am the result of propagating genetic residue; a wayward strand of coiled DNA sweat of a species first reproducing sexually as a severed micro-organism bacteria split three and a half billion years ago (3, 500, 000, 000) on a planet that is estimated to be a billion years older than that (4, 500, 000, 000)--a descendant of a rather apish hominid making it's appearance a little over seven and a half million years ago (7,500, 000) being nourished by the nearest solar life generating bulb, the sun, only 93 million miles away, shepherding and shaping the anatomy of our selected ancestral aunts and uncles into something resembling the current reflection of my own sleep-addled countenance just over one million years ago-- the cave art of lascucuex and les tres freres, what the inside of my blogg would resemble; ie, spawned from the aesthetic barometer of mankind in the makings first attempt to show someone the color of his heart--the ineffable urge to create and to give and to love, skirting onto the historical time line a slim 25,000 years ago.....

30.

Thirty-fucking years of life on this cozy little lovable galactic fleck of inhabitable dandruff. Magnetically buoyed, back spinning around a thermonuclear cosmic hearth of the sun, for in every strand of love and mysticism, there is dance and spinning and growth--holding someone at a distance and watching them shine. For such magnetism and love does exist.

30.

Thirty meted yearly installments of wonder and curiosity and craziness. Thirty years of monopolizing the majority of each bartered breath joyfully and naively oblivious to the wonder of creation, to the fact that I exist at all, that I have grown up in a usurped continent that has become the most opulent republic ever constituted under the morning umbrella of the planet. Thirty years of excessive materialism and spiritual guilt and creative pandering and curiosity. Thirty years where the advances of science and technology has been UNSURPASSED in the historical discourse of this planet. Half-my life being spent now genuflecting in front of the ocular glass and unblinking tint of the computer screen, where in addition to pursuing my drooling love of language and poems and story telling (fun stuff) i have instantaneous access to everything I have ever wanted:Every sexual yearning and late-night vice; every curiosity and wonder and insight in the world of arts, the sound of the voice that has been with me all my life patterning gentle sonnets across the mouth of instant messenger.

30 years.

Thirty years on a continent that has milked dry the udder of natural resources of her planet still while it is in it's maiden years. Thirty years of smiling and blinking and communicating and obeying the laws of physics. Thirty years of love and digestion and wanting. The occasional wished for spurts of compassion. The blissful feeling of joy and longing and oneness.

30.

A skipped dash of thirty slipped years in a vast universe flooded with an estimated over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different solar orbs stationed vast distances apart in what us humans perceive to be the canopy of the night sky from our cosmic nest. Each star capable sustaining the the cultivation of planets harboring bacteria and biology's. In a universe in which recent advances in the field of astrophysics has scientifically diagnosed our reality our universe as being comprised of at least 25 percent dark matter-a universe where much more is happening behind the stage curtain than in front of the audience--a reality where the unseen, the mystical, yields more of a compelling force in our day to day activies and choices then perhaps we can ever possibly discern.

Thirty years, being born in this time and place. realizing that you are 1 of 56, ooo,ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo (one vs. 56 trillion) disparate genetic possibilities that you turned out the way you did. In this time and place. Realizing you are the sole production of a night your parents got lucky. Realizing that if they would have waited a day, and hour, minutes before or nanoseconds later, you would simply not exist at all.

(this is why we hate thinking that our parents actually "did it"--it's actually an neurological impulse to the preservation of self )

Like one of the ten pending Guests the reader shall meet over the next ten days once told me on his front porch six years ago, "All we really are, from a macrocosmic universal perspective, is glorified cosmic bacteria trying to figure out just what the fuck is going on and not really being able to see things out of the shell of our own skulls much at all."

three zero.

Fifty-six trillion.

On a planet where the majority of animals and creatures are surprisingly water creatures and insects. This human being, a corporeal future hyphen etched into a future tomb stone someday between a dueling pillars of years. This glorified cosmic bacteria is capable of feeling such great things. Such unity. Such compassion. Such pain. Such confusion And ultimately, such love.

What follows is a birthday gala for those individuals who have changed my life. It was inspired by chapter one of Marcus Aurelius' MEDITATIONS, where the keen Roman emperor of antiquity reflects over the individuals who have mattered most to him in his lifetime and what everlasting virtues was gleaned from such mentors. It is a thank you for those individuals who have changed the way I look at the world and who have challenged me to give more, to laugh more and to smile.

So, without anymore further delay....

FTV, is diggory and polly lexicon meaning forever baby...

or more aptly the FTV acronym stands for FROM THE VAULT (wink-wink, don't plttttthhhh on my halo fartblossom) over the next week I'll be blogging about the ten individuals who have changed my life--sort of a precursor to my thirty years on the planet--an ardent THANK YOU birthday bash to the ten individuals who have changed my life, who have made my thirty lap jaunt around the nearest solar orb so memorable. More to come, but here's a from the vault from three years ago, written for a woman who gave me artistic smiles and encouragement at a time in my life when most I needed it.

FTV

AVA






The curtain is still up at the recital and thank god none of the props have tumbled over!!! The orchestra has finished tuning and a dual-tailed conductor is ticking his orchestral antenae sharply on the top of a music stand. Pattered palms have transitioned from golf-claps into complete silence. There is the moment before the thick tonal chords foam and brush over foreheads and in this moment, somehow, on the stage, there is a picture of a female being formed, almost as if in the womb, she is turning like her whole entire body is a neon ferris wheel. Music licks earlobes swifter than lips, quicker than sight and a photograph of Jasna Snrdic apporpiates both mind and heart. Her hair is snipped short, sliced autumal red, and she walks on corduroy stilts, lanky ivory appendages, the back of her pants slightly sagging, bangs drooping into her vision. This is Jasna Srndic...she is an artist, a survivor, a pixie, a sprite. She grew up in war-tattered Yugoslavia. Her father was exiled for political purposes. She has been speaking english for less than a half-decade and she is a semester shy of graduating college. She is male and female, yin and yang, exiled and invited. And everytime she says my name it sounds like this: " DAVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED"

Jasna spotted me several times before I had ever seen her. I was in the process of writing my first book, dropping out of college and having a few beers while I'm at it. Instead of studiously laboring over homework, I spent hours slapping out cheap sentences into microsoft word, trying to engender charcters and express a crazy verisimilitude. I had read too many "erudite" ugly books (Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, The Recognitions) and emulated their pedantic writing styles to the point of nauseation. I was dating a prof. ten years older than me back home who it turned out had an estranged husband and called me up sozzled one night,informing me that she had know found someone new, someone who looked just like me (long hair) but was her age.

I was merely a docile Pompeii to her capricious, unforgiving Vesuvius.

Jasna found me, in the computer lab, sawing off horribly shaped sentences for my book. She had her hair cut short and wore a thick sweaters so that her sex was by no means readily discerned. I was pounding out homerow mantras and she was laughing, a duclet laugh, hiccuping across the room, landing sideways on my shoulder. She was smiling at me, telling me that she had seen me from across the quad. She had seen me lugging books into my room, she had seen me here in the computer lab, flicking out sounds of snapped plastic and looking serious, oh, did I ever look so serious was I a writer? She asked. Could I be Herman Hesse she asked.

She kept laughing. Her smile sprinkled with cosmic glitter.

"I see you all time and never you seem to see me." She said, talking in beautiful curled; heavily twisted sentences void of articles. I looked at her (still trying to discern her sex--she looked like Peter Pan!) and offered her serious blather about aesthetics; collegiate bosh.

"You are serious. You look so serious everytime you I see." She ascertained, looking at the inside of my hands, as if perusing an interstate map. Then she began to laugh. "You crazy. Daveeeeeed is crazy." She said. Although I still couldn't tell what 'she' was.

Her name was Jasna (Yahz-nuh)and she was an artist. We would go on walks and she would pick up scattered leaves and hold them up into the orange patches of dusk. She would collect acorns and milkweeds. The grayish-taupe of a midwesteren autumn seemed to melt into her art. She was a painter. She had a painting at the MCA in Chicago! She was also a photographer. She had pictures of a Wilmette centered papal-hatted shaped building in her room. Both of us had no clue what the building was used for.

Her hair was trimmed exceedingly military short when I met her. She talked with torched nostalgia of Yugoslavia, of her grandparents who were left there, alone, spending the last years of their lives together. She talked about ethnic-cleansing. Her father was Islam. Her mother was christian. Neither of them were practicing. She talked of her sister who liked boys, of her sister who was a pharmacist in Vienna, she talked of her art teacher in Yugoslavia who she hadn't heard form in a long time because communication lines had somehow been severed....

....over the years there have been friends, lovers, associates, e-mail affinities, ersatz crushes, blogging buddies, townies, hippies, indulgent artists, anarchists, single-minded philosophers, material-driven yuppies and there has been Jasna, a friend I took for granted for a long time. She would slip elfish-slovanian writing on little slips of brown paper beneath the door in my dorm. She would leave me delicately wrapped sandwhiches. She would compare me to Demian in Hesse's novel. She would stare at the pictures of Ganesh and Shiva on my wall as if they were a branch steming off the same genealogical trunk.

She would also create art.

Three years younger and she was already three times the artist I'll ever be. At her request (reluctantly) I severed thick tressed of my hair and she tied them together, placed them in her apartment.

"Look, Daveeeeeeed." She said, pointing at thinly hair stalactites.

"What," I said, hardly noticing.

"No," She said. "Look past hair. Look at shadow hair creates. Look how it moves slightly, delicately."

She was right. The focus was the shadow, created by the light, shifted gravitationally throughout the day. We would hold each other in winter, in her apartment, her body smelled like nutmag and chestnuts, we would hold each other in a platonic bite and we would watch the shadow. Diaphnous ledger lines on sheet music, altered by the slight tug of a planet; a planet interfacing with a giant thermonuclear hearth, 93 million miles away.

Jasna also had charcoal pictures of trees in her room. All over her room. Black and white photographs of friends and smeared charcoal branches of trees.

"Tree's name is AVA," she said, offering the world her crooked ply-wood smile. "It is tree we walked under first day we met, remember?" It was the tree I used to read her stories underneath. Whenever I read her a story, even a menial paragraph, she would pogo noth and south smile and clap, like a observant mother watching her newborn crawl for the first time. Even the bad stories, which, even today, sprout nocturnally like whiskers.

"Ava," I said, musing.

"She never told you her name. But her name Ava. She tree from Yugoslavia." Jasna says.
Sometimes we would walk and Jasna would take off sprinting, for no reason, Yugoslovian sunset smile still soaked into her face. Sometimes, she would whisper things to me, as we would cuddle, saying the same vexing Amercain phrase over and over again in almost a scraped whisper.

"There no more time Daveeeeed." She said, quietly.

"Shut up." I would say, drowsed in sleep, her hiccuping into a whisper again.

"There time no more Daveeeeeeed."

*

But Jasna has been there. Poor herself, the summer I took off to write she sent me money for food and RENT, even though I didn't ask for it. She listened when I blathered about my romantic histrionics. When I phoned the saturday after my father's funeral she melted the airwaves with tears, tears for a man she had never met, but had perhaps, like Shive and Ganesh, she had somehow known.

Jasna and I have a friendship where we slip into each other and out---like strands on a DNA fiber, we find each other, weave out, circle a set of microscopic rungs called life, and until our individual strands sew into each other again. The last time I saw her I fulfilled a vow and took her dancing, at a gay bar no less.

"They not care here Daveeeeed. They are open."

"I don't want to dance." I said, under the kaledioscopic gash of lights.

"It's easy." Said Jasna. As she set aside her drink and began to pogo up and down, as if she were on a matress, twelve years younger, and her americain parents were away for the weekend.

"Here, Daveeeeeeed." She said, groping my hand, and we danced. We swirled, crashed into each other, apologized to a Queen whose Zima had slipped away form her like a glass scepter, but still, under the stuttering electronic lights of the dance floor, we lost track of our shadows, we lost track of time and we would again arrive back to her apartment and hold each other--simply hold each other, the moment the strand is unionized.

And the last time I saw her, when I said goodbye, the bus that I was suppose to be on was late. We would say goodbye, kiss each others cheeks, I would grapple my luggage and the bus driver would apologize, say that the bus that was suppose to be was behind schedule and would arrive in fiftten. Fifteen minutes later, at the sight of the aluminum hyphen we would embrace again, seed kisses into each others cheeks again, and I would grip the leather lobes of my suitcase to once again be informed that the bus I needed was still running late.

"Here," Jasna said, reeling a scrolled-telescopic shaped cylinder form her own bag.

"What's this?" I inquired.

"Open," She said, her beaded eyes averted, as if looking for the bus I was to take home. WHen I spread open the scroll it was a charcoal rendering of what I perceived to be a tree.

"Ava?" I asked, looking at the portly trunk flaring off into desoalte autumnal branches.

"No Daveeeeeeeed." Jasna said, " Daveeeeeeeeeed so silly."

"What is it then?" I asked, just as another bus the bus I was to take home, the bus that would charter me back to my home, back to my 80 work week, back to the pain and perils of commerce and civilization.

"Your bus," Jasna said, as we embraced once again, only quickly this time.

"Jasna," I said, inquring about the origins. The bus driver was sliding luggage beneath the steel guts of the bus. He was shouting tickets.

"It's you Daveeeeeeeed." Jasna said again. "It's your hands."

I looked again but she pushed and I fell upward, somehow, on to the bus. Knowing that I had just broken away (although only momentarily) form that friend whom I shared something inexplicable and sacred with. That person who I loved, only not in a way I loved say Swissy-Missy or the prof. who lauded me with compliments and then smiled duplicitously into foreign shadows.

The next thing I know I was on the bus and I was looking out, looking out past the dual-tint of my own shadow, out at Jasna, waving at me as the bus mechanically spurted and droned and lumbered towards the thick curve of the interstate. A scrolled charcoal rendering of my hands curved in my fist; and Jasna, the elusive adrogynous sprite who found me one day, a day when I was being too serious; the creature who stretches out the vowels in the center of my name, the person who planted my calloused palms and made stringed marionetted shadows with my own hair; I saw that person waving at me, an acorn smile gnawed at her lips, and looked at her waving until she became a button and then she became no more.

Morning in autumn is how he awakes, early, and after ensconced in the bottom lip of a leftover dream world....

Morning in autumn is how he awakes, early, after less than four hours of aspirated nerve-rattling sleep, trying to anticipate, trying to stay cool, trying to leave to the place—a place he feels like he has already left. Her smile. Her face. It is autumn.1996. he is a freshman at the community college shaped like a russet brick ash tray across the river. He is all alone. He is leaving. His bedroom adorned with pictures of vaunted writers and tattered manuscripts and books. He has just given his best friend copy of Herman Hesse. He quotes the rote Autumnal fallen leaf shaped verbal tithings of Leaves of Grass. He fells all alone. He feels in Love. He feels as if he is leaving. He feels as if he has already left.

The coffee pot in his room makes a sound as if it is yearning to be petted. He has showered the night before. He looks in the mirror, swipes the crusty flecks of sleep from his eyes. Tries to smile. Tries not spend more than what seems vain getting lost into the mirrored slate of the Vanity frame.

And he is leaving.

He is taking one bag for the flight. A red duffle bag. Inside he has packed two shirts, one gray and one black for long sleeved comfort. He rolls and extra pair of jeans into the size of a papoose and wedges it deeply into the side of his carryon. He stuffs a row of fig bars, two inside out pair of black socks that a wrapped in a fashion suggestive that they are humping.

He is leaving.

His hair is cut short and fashionably coifed. His mother has done the best job she has ever had cutting his hair. He feels as if he is trying to reclaim something. He feels as if he is trying to discern something. He feels as if he is trying to shout out, to pour out the contents of his overtly caffeinated soul into the eyes and ears of a young seventeen year old girl. She is a senior in high school in a city in Wisconsin. He is a freshman at a community college in a city eight hours south of where she resides. Six weeks ago he quit his job at Barnes and Noble to be a full time college student. To arrive at he brick fortress of the institution early. To indulge in the sentences, the stories, the narratives, to wend his heart into the locomotive swerve of the page. The sentences he wishes to compose.

He smoked cigars. He indulges in healthy summer nights jaunt, watching the sun as it spills it golden late august rays. Watching the exact moment the globes of street lights illuminate the side walks on Moss Avenue. Watching. Seeking. Yearning.

And he is leaving.

It is going on 7am. The leaves in front of his house on Sherman always turn late. The sweet gum tree his grandfather planted when he was three months old. He puts a razor and shaving cream and a tooth brush and a comb and hairspray inside his red duffle bag. He is wearing the pair of velvet Doc Martens he bought in Munich six months earlier. The pair he bought only two weeks after he first met Megan. The pair his ex-girlfriend Kristina Rock accidentally dropped and egg on last summer so that now, the top of the right shoe has a stain and looks like it is permanently crying. A peninsula shaped smudge that, upon closer inspection, grants the top of his shoe the melancholy semblance of a clown doused in loss. A sadness. A tear.

He is leaving.

He packs deodorant. He packs his contact solution. He packs a light beige jacket. He packs sunglass. There is one-hundred dollars in his wallet. More than enough for the weekend. For taking her out. For holding her close. For conveying to her through the green-leaf world of materialism just how he feels.

He is leaving.

He misses her. He wants to be with her. He wants to reel her shoulders into his body. He desires to sputter out meaningless verbal drivel; hermaphroditic sentences, in an endeavor to make her laugh. Make her smile. Make her come to him.

He is leaving.

He draws the navy blue comforter over his bed as if he is reeling back the polyutherane sheet over a corps and then tucks it into the corners. He looks at the bed and wonder s what will change in his life between this exact moment and the next time he looks across the horizon of his nightly continent. He slaps splashes of acidic cologne onto both sides of his cheek. Takes a swig of caffeine. Notices the morning denim; the stunning atmosphere of autumn, outside his bedroom window.

He goes downstairs and feels the gruff follicles of his father beard and he gives him an embrace, His father tells him that he will be there Sunday night, at the student center, at the Bus depot, to pick him up. His sisters have already gotten ready for school. Beth is a senior at the high school he graduated from just three months earlier. Jenn is a sophomore and attends a Christian Academy across town.

“Girls have an amazing weekend.” He says, not registering to hear their volleyed hi-pitched confetti response of “you too.”

He is leaving.

Shielded in front of his immediate vision are notes for his pending Speech midterm. Prof hahn has allowed him to take the exam earlier in the morning so that he can catch his bus. So that he can catch his flight. So that he can catch his heart.

He feels good. This girl is good for him. He has not had a cigarette in over two weeks.

Back into his bedroom he has little more to pack. He wedges a small bible into the bag to feel that God is on his side. He opens the third drawer from the bottom of his mahogany writer’s desk and brings out the envelope with his tickets and flight itinerary. He places his copy of LEAVES OF GRASS in the top of the bag. The bag is fraught with relics of his life. He packs two spiral notebooks with pens. Zipping up the red sports bag as a bride trying to fit into a corset, the last item he places in is his notebooks of poems; inky linguistic scraps of his heart he has composed for this autumnal creation over the discourse of the past year.

He sets the red carry-on in the center of his bed and stares at it with wonder. He will pick it up after his exam before he heads to catch the bus 10:30 bus. The red duffle bag is bulbous and still life and a slight breeze sips through his bedroom window. Without pause or hesitation the man drops to his knees. His body contorts into the mattress, humped over in reverence, his chest concave, his fists a clenched fetus of supplication and thanksgiving. His Clef note shaped body, his wild heart, is now thanking God, asking God for safety. For protection. For the perfect weekend.

Briefly he wonders if it is going to rain.

He exits his room shielded with only his midterm exam notes, taking copious swigs from coffee cup. His sister Beth has already left for school. It his job to deliver Jenny to her classes across town before he arrives to his own institution of edification.

Arrive only to leave.

He enters the earthy-linoleum scent of the kitchen and kisses his mother on her cheek. His mother informs him that she will be praying for him throughout the weekend.

He saddles his scholastic backpack over his shoulder and peruses over notes. His sister Jenny follows him into the Buick. It is autumn 1996. Limp placards heralding the arrival of Dole/Kemp or Clinton/Gore arch above the manicured lawns like eyebrows. The air outside pulsates and thumbs with tilt of the planet slowly being brushed into the winter of another year.

The car door rattles shit with a thud. He twists the thumb shaped nozzle to the radio on full blast. With rote orchestrations of his wrist and hands akin to that of a dance, the car jilts into life and skids into the road, into the direction and discourse of another day.

He is leaving only to find out he has already left. A long, long time ago. In a different world.

DON'T KNOW HOW IN THE HELL SHE DOES IT...

My angel has boxing gloves as well as wings.

She eats my heart in front of me

She pummels me

She licks up all my oxygen

She knocks me out for the count...


and then she delivers

the most beautiful, peaceful dream

spiritually serene

Where everything is new

between us

pure rivulets

streams of beaming light

(where it is new)

and the excitement

and flashes

of our conversations

have yet to convene

and everything we have

buttons and rosebuds

the smile of our beginning


second time this has happened

Heartbreak and Hades...

Voluntary spiritual absence from the woman I love

April will be here soon darlin'

and spring and the earth

will be new

and there will be forever

(smiles) and laughter and

pulchritude and joy

and Life!!!!


mwah's not mara's.....

You know you've been diagnosed with a steady case of bloggers' block...

...When you peek under your dashboard and realize that every date is neon green (neon green on blogger is indicative of a germinal blogg draft in utero) and you realize that no one has viewed anything you've scribbled over the past summer because you haven't bothered to buff up the interior rants and emotional blatherings of your ever bleeding, pulsating, foundering heart.

In a way it's nice being anonymous, but I dearly miss the cyber-companionship from hence this blogg was based--and if the cornerstone of all aesthetics isn't love and friendships and community then, in the immortal words of the Stratford bard himself "I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

And everyone who knows me knows that Buddy has a whole lotta love.


...................

Graduated Magnum Cum Laude in May. Got hired on as full time faculty at the library in June. For the first time in shit-knows-how long I'm raking in bank. For three years I worked between 50-80 hours week, lived more or less at the poverty level, was eligible for food stamps and never knew the definition of the word weekend.

If you dedicate your life to something other than yourself you invariable end up knowing a lot about poverty and suffering and loneliness and failure and hurt. Over the past three years I experienced poverty...I've crashed in my car, lived in houses where there was always cat shit on the carpet ( damnit Alexander!), lived in an apartment where I had to practically dissect the toilet everytime in order for it to flush. Two years ago I had only two pairs of jeans, a six hundred page long manuscript, a vehicle that needed a new serpentine belt, and a family that wanted little--if anything-- to do with me.

Now color is wending its way back into the bends of my flesh and forehead, I have more than one pair of shoes in the closet and I am starting to work out again--both at the gym and on the keyboard. I'm sending stories out on a regular basis for publication and my mother cuts my hair every two weeks.

The healing didn't happen all at once, but gradually, over the past three months, I'm starting to feel revived. I'm starting to feel alive.

Because, in a weird way, she requested, that's all...

The memory of the two of us was perfect. Thanks for bein' my muse last semester, angel.

somehwere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

-e.e.cummings

So you wanted to be a writer, hey boy....

Glossaria

(journal comments transcribed from various inky squiggles)

* This is how fiction works. Like in the beginning of Cannery Row when Steinbeck pisses out a sully vignette for the reader about “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints, and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing. . . .”


*This is where fiction takes you.

“Fiction is what it’s like to be a complete, sentient fucking human beings versus a rather sophisticated mammal.” -David Foster Wallace author of Infinite Jest

“ Though the night was made for loving and the day returns to soon.”

Licking the circuitous fiction with your pen, you’re wont to comment about what doesn’t work for you, yet you forget that secret place—where language opened up, like her body opened up, where language gave birth to that scene, to that story, to linear horizon of that perfectly trimmed sentence, tugging across the page in lil’ locomotives whiffs.

Climb aboard.

“Early in my life it was too late.”

I fell in love with the girl who wrote the taco poem. Fell in love with the neon splash of lights brushing into the parking lot, fell in love with the oblique angle of the first kiss, fell in love with the way the sentences open and closes the way garage door opens and closes.

“She’ll be riding three white horses when she comes.”

George Saunders, Ryu Murakami, Sherman Alexie, John Updike, Jim Harrison, Tillie Olson…scraps of New Yorker entitled fiction eviscerated from the guts of the magazine in little ridged sears.

Like sex, our instructor urges us to read “Hard, fast and well.”


** Implicit Irony. Our instructor remains dubious of the unblinking oracular lens perched above drywall like Poe’s pestering ode to ornithological beaks and flaps, irked of Big Brother’s espial sonnets, yet we unzip lives, split veins, caligraph images in our blood.

Outside of class I petitioned females. I asked them if they were elusive Sappho that penned the Taco ode.

****poem by Rishika Murphy to brighten up my facebook

“Here I sit
Broken hearted

Had to shit
But only farted”

Compared to Pounds :
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough. “Love is not Love which alters when it alteration find” An ever fixed mark: The story about Prince Albert; the loafers in search for the perennial jell-o high, Pastor Rupert, “ A garrison of single-engine planes,” the porn star, the dildo, the Speed Date D-cup dating service, the monkey pajamas, the funeral home victim, lying supine and listless. The instructor oriented memos received via e-mail chauffeured via warbled hieroglyphics splashes of the mother ship. “When something is well hidden it is hard to find.” “Oh we are being visited.” Heaps of linguistic slop. Alphabetical flotsam and jetsam. Peoria—the genital wart of the Midwest. Bradley university. David von Behren. Illegitimate great-great grandson of Lydia Moss Bradley. Still 30+ in the hole. Turtle Tinswell, Sister Terisita, “Those panties saved my life.” Sister Marva and her anatomically correct gnomes. The anecdote about the clowns who run the STD clinic. Fucking Jim Les. (Dick Les) fucking president Broski who doesn’t read. Fucking witches in Swords Hall. Fucking English department on the hilltop that lives familial comforts appalling to the so called loser –scribblers whose tomes they teach. Writers who lived in squalor so English fuckwads could live comfortably Joseph Campbell on being a writer: Can you afford ten years of your life and not make it. Joseph Campbell on not obtaining a PhD: You can tell the level of [intellectual puerility] dependency by the number of footnotes in their writing. Even the Guerrila Girrls were afraid to be naked while “intellectualizing” their passions. Write a book that they’ll boast about. Make sure to employ witticism, catch phrases, memorable characters…..put yer’ heart in a gin bottle and hurtle it into a shopping mall as far as you fucking can. Watch the spume of glass christening the linoleum pavement of commerce… The spasmodic bleeps of barcodes, the sounds of traffic lumbering in a parking lot, jockeying for position, the poetry of ATM machines. “All my life Father believed in Angels.” Rick Bass. Denis Johnson. Anthony Doerr. Loorie Moore. Carole Maso. Jerzy kosinki. “Why don’t you pull a Holden Caulfield and tell your readers something that they really want to know.” The perfect sentence. The perfect female. Ulysses, The Recognitions, Mason and Dixon, Underworld, Infinite Jest, War and Peace, Women and Men, Gravity’s Rainbow The moment where author, language and reader becomes one entity The acquiescence of the trinity, taking your breath away, taking you to that place that you are afraid to go on your own…. “Alas poor yorrick” We read and we ink and we peruse over lumpy, cancerous sentences, drilling our eyesight between the collective gaps of images, hoping to lose ourselves in a wayward image.

Where would the college of liberal arts and sciences be w/out the trite phrase “I think that…”

Don’t think. “Write like your life depended on it.”

Fuckin’ Dave Eggers.

No one has time to write a novel the size of an SUV.

Everybody wants to go to Heaven but nobody wants to die.

Ineluctable modality of the visible.

“I don’t understand it.”

“I think…..”

“Everyone wants to live forever but no one wants to grow old.”

Just give the prof. what he wants. Just give the readers a story.”

“Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable.”

Where would Best American Short stories be without Oates, Munro, Updike, TC Boyle?

Don’t talk about writing, don’t write about writing, bring something into the world. Quit putting it off, brother.

Even Hawthorne had to begin with the letter A.

If you want to know what fiction is, write what you think that fiction is…..

“listen, I will be honest with you;
I don not offer old new prizes; but offer rough new prizes
These are the days that must happen to you”

John Gardner. Raymond Carver.

Where are the prof’s that submit there shit on a weekly basis?

Where is anyone who gives in order to shine?

“old country Soul/Where’s your Jesus”


I finally found her—after numerous interrogations and a couple of shits and a party at the Treehouse.

“Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there/ With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.”

The girl. The taco poem. I wanted to eat her tongue. I wanted to lick the unsuspecting fingers tips that trifled out such beauty.”

“I didn’t really think the poem was any good.” Was all she said, rather coyly, flapping the curtain of bangs gently from her forehead.

“The golden apples of the moon/ the silver apples of the tongue.”

“Though the earth was made of loving.”

Quit worrying so much about what the author is trying to say and start worrying about you want to say.

“What thought lovest well remains…”

Try to split your heart our from your fingertips, on to the cosmic blue of the computer screen

“…the rest is dross.”

Call for the high road once again:

Small town girl, a train in england, vital nutrients, life of a pen, a poem written in the fashion of a calculator which my classmates have deemed as “cute” and Ezra Pound has deemed as…..

Just show up every morning at MS Word—like left field, once that ball is hit out there
Be there to receive it….

I love the sentence “ She could feel him growing inside of her.”

The hoi poloi of fiction. The journey of discovery. The place where you go when you want someone to hold you, baby.

poem for angela

Here's a poem I wrote for a children's mathbook (yeah-me-math-kids-nada)...The book was edited by angela (who makes young writers look good!!!!)...angela also made me feel VERY special when she stopped me in the middle of the road one day and told me that she loved my writing. Only angela wasn't angela then (she was a stranger) and when a total stranger waltzes up to you and says "thank you" for something you've scribbled, you know you're in the right profession, damnit! No matter what the take home bank. So, without further ado.....



CORNELIUS ZERO BECOMES A HERO

Many a half-moons ago across Sunshine Terrain
Lived the Integer family of 3.14 Prime Lane
A decorous Kingdom of dactyls and digits
No rascals, insurgents or mischief’s or midgets
No negative dashes or frustrated fractions
No unfinished units, or wayward transactions
For the Integer clan was quite certain of one junction
That each separate member of their family held a certain function


King Cassius and Queen Carnessa, royal father and mother
Had added the sum of thousands of numbers
There was Cody and Caitlin, Colette and Christine
All shaped like the numbers ahead of sixteen
Cassandra the bore who was looked like a four
Cormac and Clinton who discretely swore
That there were no greater numbers of royal court ordinals
‘cept for oldest sib Cameron who kept stats for the Cardinals.


The King and Royal Mother were proud of their progeny
All capable of excelling in numerical homogeneity
The off-springs were excellent in deducing absolutes
Whether adding, dividing or extrapolating geometrical proofs
So proud were the parents of both children and place
They adhered to the Laws of the numerical race
Except for the youngest the sweetest and dearest
Shaped like a zero, his name was Cornelius.


Cornelius was egg-shaped, his cheeks were quite bare
He sat in the center of the number-lined Fair
To his right he saw negative digits saluting
To his left was his family all perfect, recruiting
Fellow Integers to add to the Integer chain
But Cornelius would always remain the same and the same
Stuck in the center while numbers stretched far
While Clinton and Cormac harassed and sassed, claiming
“How could you be so important if you know not what you are?”


Cornelius was sad. He knew not his function.
Queen Carnessa decided to host a family-all luncheon
She invited second cousins of triple esteem
And numerical pillars from Rome so it seemed
She sat all the numbers around a golden timetable
Clearing her throat, as if commencing a fable.
“Lend me your ears, calculators, rulers and proofs
your tip charts, your protractors, line graphs and mathematical truths


“You make fun of Cornelius, thinking his sum worthless
You scoff at his semblance and heckle his purpose
You think of him funny, deem him a heathen
While some brandish him odd, others think him of even
And while it will appall you, you’ll think it’s not true
That his total existence marks the absence of you
So I invite all my digits to squint and take a closer look
Sometimes the truth differs from the answers in the back of the book.


“For Cornelius the Zero gives birth to your shape
Your worth, merit and height, your numerical weight
Think his contour the egg from hence you all hatched from
The ongoing center of the infinite drum
The moment from when time convened there was nothing
Except for Cornelius he was there, he was something!”
Carnessa paused in her speech, she looked throughout all the legions
The Thousands, the Millions, the Billions, the seasons

Of numbers stretched far as both eyes could see
Then Carnessa turned to Cornelius and giggled with glee.
“It’s a glum paradox by not being you be
By not being you, you Cornelius, give life to me
You give breath to the shapes of every number indented
You are the greatest concept ever invented

You serve as the greatest numerical threshold
You separate the positive and chauffer the negative
You keep all the numbers in balance in check.”
Turning to her fellow Integers, the Queen adjusted her neck
“So next time please, don’t be so rash with your assumptions
For even absolute nothing creates an important function!!!”

So next time you find yourself alone or estranged
Feel free to skirt across the sunshine, to 3.14 Prime Lane
Where wise Queen Carnessa will tell you herself
That Cornelius the Zero is a concept, one cannot do without.

A Very sniffle sniff-sniff sweet and sour sentimental "Awwwwwwwwwww"

After devouring barbecue ribs marinated with either arsenic or hemlock (!) and spending the fourth day of July puking the crimson interior of my guts out, diagnosed with vile food poisoning, my beloved co-workers pulled a fast one and threw me a SURPRISE BIRTHDAY PARTY!!!!! They even sang Happy Birthday to me in the middle of the library atrium!!!!!!

What a staff!!!! ( I know, they're just probably sucking up to the boss so I can give them all the hours they want next semester--hehehe) But still, I was EXTREMELY touched. Lena made me a birthday cake, Erich supplied the pop, Barb dished out copious amounts of KFC, and somebody even bought Humus, for all those devout vegetarians out there!!!!!

Once again, to my beloved staff( Justin, Lexie, Gretchen, Erich, Lena, Jysonthna, Jessica, Sarah) you guys are awesome!!!!! Thanx for ALL Your HARD Work! And thanx for making this crazy writer feel so welcome!

Sometimes its nice just to feel like you belong...

All is fair in blogg and war...

Here's a filched e-mail I received last week from an (ex-ex-ex) girlfriend ( 8 years ago) whose semi-elusive face occasionally blurs its way back into my blogg. I figure it's only fair to let her have her say in cyberspace. Enclosed is the letter she sent me and my response. I'd love to hear what my devout fellow bloggsters think about this one. For her privacy sake, I'll omit her name, and for confessionalists sake--yeah, I was prety much an asshole:

David,
Googled my name (as everyone must do once in a while), and came across your "musings." I saw "Infinite Jest" on the clearance rack at Borders the other day and thought of you. I'm sorry to hear about your dad.

Things here are going wonderfully. Chad and I have been married 4 years (and believe me, I am equally glad it wasn't you in the picture with my wedding dress), and we have an amazingly beautiful 7 month old son named Griffin, who I take care of full-time. My life is just as I hoped it would be, and I don't think everyone can say that, so I consider it a success.

I have to say, I felt kind of violated when your blog came up with my full name in it. I guess you can just post whatever you want about someone else, but it's still kind of invasive. And I think you took a bit of poetic license.

I hope your life is on track and things work out for you as you wish. In spite of how poorly you treated me, I made my peace with you a long time ago, and know that a lot of that came from how unhappy you were. Hopefully you are happier now. Oh, and by the way, I "know words" not because of who my uncle is, but because of that 800 on my SAT verbal :)

***

Mrs. ________!

Wow!!!! Glad to hear your life is fabulous!!!!! I actually almost accumulated the gall to dig up your digits and phone you up threeyears ago the night Duke lost to Indiana in the sweet 16! I thought itwas rather ironic and all...you living in Indiaina and being such a Die-hard coach K fanatic.

Congrats on your marraige and newborn!!!! (didn't you plan on naming your first born Christopher? Chris Collins will be dismayed.)

Sounds like you did some serious cyber-splunkering to locate my blogg. After I received your letter I did numerous google searches on your name and nothing came up. Hell, if you type in my name into the vacant googolized horizon the address for my blogg doesn't even come up, so lord knows how you managed to unearth it.

Life here is good. I just got hired on as faculty at the cullom-davis library. I sold my first short story last October and just completed awhopping 700 page single spaced page manuscript which took me fouryears to scribble. The novel is titled YELLOW MONKEY BARS & UNBIDDENERECTIONS: A FAILED CAMPAIGN. The protagonist name is a lad called BUSTER HIGHMAN. He's a portly, bavarian flatulant artist and who can't get laid for the life of him. I seriously doubt if the novel will eversee the light of day, but who knows.

Sorry if you took offense to anything that was written. I sort of use blogger as a verbal batting cage--a place to bash around thoughts before I go down on MS WORD for nine hours a night. Blogging's a great method to blow some steam, reminisce or simply feel creative.

Time to go. Looks like we both inherited the beautiful lives we were meant to lead.

All the best, ____, and let the beauty you love be what you do....
David Von Behren",1]

Patriarchal Pandora and a new found feather for my father

Every male that I know of keeps a chest of mired masculinity burrowed somewhere deeply inside their immediate living environment. Sometimes the chest is an old NIKE shoe-box or a chipped briefcase. Sometimes the chest is on-line or stashed in soft-core passges, nestled between makeshift matresses. Sometimes the chest is a bucket of failed memories, burnt out bric-a-brac randomly arranged inside the lonely vectors of the man's pulsating heart-- a wild sputter of echoed aches, lost throbs and smudged glories.

Sifting through the contents of these private treasures is like probing into the archeology of the feral continent of a man's heart. The peeping pandora finds out of what an individual lives for-- you rake through his mistakes, his foibles, his sins--you glimpse through a keyhole and catch a snippet of his forbidden love, the morningdew still moist from childhood, the electric frisson of his first kiss--the sudden arrival of his life.

Some men keep pictures of wives or girlfiends or ex-lovers or children. Some men keep cigar wrappers, condoms, phone numbers, forlorn love letters, jewlery, vacant bottles of cologne, valuable baseball cards, jaundice yearbooks, varsity letters. Some men keep overdue bills, passports, family heirlooms, birth certificates.


In my own chest at home (a self-ordained muse box) I have rough drafts of a few of my early stories, two rings that belonged to my father, photographs of ex-girlfriends, a CD of my own father's funeral I still haven't accumulating the gall to audibly relive.

I have pictures of females. The proverbial "one that got away", a portrait of the blonde-streaked feminist-bitch who smashed my heart into fragments of chipped pottery, another photograph of the woman who chose to marry for money and so did.

And letters. Inky strokes of palsied promises and violated vows. Letters fused with loopy feminist handwriting--long paragraphs paragraphs festooned with shapes and breath dredging up a memory, a voice, a warmth.

Here's a letter I found a few weeks back while sifting through an old chest of my late-father's personal belongings. The letter was composed forty years ago, by a gentlemen named Russ Peterson. I have no clue who Russ Peterson is. At the time the letter was written my father would have been seventeen years old, graduating from High school, ready to attending the University where his only son has recently been employed.

I post the letter today in lieu of father's day and as a meditation of manhood. I simply request that those who peruse it, take a moment to think about their own lineage.



Dear Friend Arthur,

Often I think of you and keep you in remebrance and in my prayers. I know you are graduating from High School this spring but know not the date; thus this may be late. Nevertheless, I must send this to you. I went to five stores attempting to find a card that would express what I wanted to say to you but to no avail, thus I hope you will not mind this simple note of greeting.

I pray God our heavenly Father, His gracious blessings for you as you soon are to graduate. I thank our Lord he has given to you His light and understanding. May the Holy Spirit lead you and give to you the inisght to use what you have learned in school so far as preparation for fuller service to Him and fellow men in whatever that calling may be. I thank our Lord, Arthur, that He has given to you faith in Christl love and hope and a Christian outlook on life. I know that in years to c ome you will continue as you have in the past, to live for Jesus, and to HIs honor and glory. May he give to you confidence in His guidance, a strond trust in His love and grace as you face new decisions and uncertainties and possible doubts for the future. Above all, may your youthful and loving heart ever find peace and refuge in the loving heart of Jesus, in whom we have fellowship with one another.

I say this not sentimentally, but in all honesty and sincerity, you are a fine boy, credit to your family and a jewel in the kingdom of God. I recall one day, Arthur, while you were still attending Christ School (8th grade) you had just come off patrol duty and was riding north on your bicycle on Starr Street. Some small boys from school were playing with a ball in the playground (you perhaps do not remember the incident but I will always remember it). As you passed the playground the ball ran into the street and one of the little first graders ran after the ball. Just as he was to step out into the street (there was traffic) he noticed you had stopped your bike. You laid down your bike on the curbing, went out into the street, retrieved the ball to the curb and handed the ball to the little boy.

As I stood in the library alone and looking out I witnessed what you did. I prayed a prayer to Jesus which went something like this: "Thank you Lord for this fine, wonderful boy. In love for thee he has shown love for this little boy. O Lord, guide him, guard and protect him in service for Thee."

I am thus confident Arthur, that by the Holy Spirit within you and your love for the Savior who has redeemed you and loves you to the end, you will always love Him and serve Him who has done so much for you and me.

Thus, in whatever calling he will lead you, I know you will be doing it in service for the Lord Jesus. To this end then, dear Arthur, I commend you to the care and keeping of our precious Savior, the Lord Jesus.

Greet Dad and mom, Larry and little Chris. We remember you all and think of you often.

Your friend,

Russ Peterson

dated Sunday, May 30th, 1965

*
Happy Fathers day, daddy!!! Love you buddy.


David Arthur Von Behren

B(itch)logg and Happy Mother's Day

Been working around the numerical disc of the clock; the emaciated thin limbs of the hour and minute hand shuffle past stiff integers of time as the semester wends its way into completion and I find myself (in less than a week) cloaked in a drape of black, jigging to pomp and circumstance, grasping the slanted palm of Dr. Browski--prestigious president of BU--fightin' off the spontaneous urge to spoonfeed him the finger (my own diplomatic dactyl of integrity and emancipation) while humming out Pink Floyd's infamous introit, more apt in an age where the once gilded, inemitable annals of higher education have sourly transitioned into a financial bulwark oppressing the financial future of many a working-class students, such as myself, for the next three-to-four decades.

"We don't need no education!
We don’t need no thought control!
No dark sarcasm in the classroom!
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!"


Yep, education these days pretty much truckles to the whims of all the pretty-boys Little Lord Fountainbleau's hailing from the likes of Skokie and Schaumburg. They have short hair, drink cheap domestic beer, deem themselves an authoritative asset on politics, never fully know their spouse, inherit their father's erstaz bussiness, have a hard time getting through Slaughterhouse Five let alone allowing their terse attention span to trek across any narrative that can't be imminently fast-forwarded, rewound or freeze framed.

It's almost an evolutionary phenomenom. Six million years ago; by process of evolution and natural selection, certain vectors of our species become bi-pedal, learn to walk up right, learn how to stretch and instigate muscles they never knew existed in order to behoove the development of the clan and perpetuate the betterment of mankind.

Now, six-million years later, society still seems bracketed into those who can walk and those who can't. (When those who walk employ SUV as crutches--the artist has no choice but to fledge his wings and offer those with attuned lobes a healthy flap).

The north american yuppie--a most disgusting mammal. The pessimism that exudes through the cracks of this entry comes from working thirty hours straight, ferrying to the whims of these short hair pretty boys. It comes from bantering with them, encouraging them, appeasing them, lauging with them, serving them. It comes from secretly wanting to be one. Wanting to have the assurance, the commodities, the trust fund christened from umbilicus, the mortgage (the know-it-all Manard's on Saturday, tinkering around the house genius, the bolwing trophy wife)--It comes from being exhausted. It comes from realizing that, the role of the Buddha is "Joyful participation in the suffering of the world" even if that suffering means you'll be in a piss-all tax bracket; that suffering still alloactes an element of freedom--it allows you to be able to sing, to dance, to make love, to be astonished by the thermonuclear slants of the sun, even in old age. It allows you to see.


True, looking back, myself (like allota kids I admire) have never known a week of school where I wasn't engaged in working extraneous jobs to pay exorbitant tuition rates. Scribbling out third shift timecards on a weekly basis may have deprived me of being a student, but, in all realization, it crafted me into a storyteller. It hardened my arteries, bolstered my awareness and apprecieation for the working class, made me dubious about US politics and above all, gave me the one diploma, that is never finished, that I work on every day, every hour, every moment....

A blogg for the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.....

No, not Maggie this time. Nor Sexy Sarah who reads Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and has a splash of red hair that would drive any mammal in possession of male artillery thin-weak at the caps of his knees. Nor vivacious Stephanie whose been a real buddy to me this past semester (even though she always leaves her goddamn panties at my house *smiles*) nor Brilliant Hippie Nicki who studies philosophy and whose mind is a gaseous planet full of atmospherical insight and profound beauty. No, sorry, not even Arya and Daniela both of whom in the past year have provided me with the feeling of security and love that often eludes me in face-to-face relationships. Not my brilliant sister Beth, either, who practically disowned me after my father's sudden death, claiming that I was being too selfish (Beth and I have rectified our rapport since then--she's graduated from LAW school in downtown Chicago in two weeks and I couldn't be more proud)--Nor my graceful sister Jenn who has the lead in CRAZY FOR YOU--and who I'm still "working on" to better our rapport--No, this is a concourse orchestrated Blogg directed at a dear friend of mine name Tricia Nyhus, an english teacher here at Bradley, a fellow contemporary 'crazy' screenplay writer, a wife, a mother of three, and--most imperatively--my hero.

I first met Tricia at a reception for then poet laureate of the United States Billy Collins, April of 2004 (Collins' wrote the cigarette poem I posted a few months back). Collins' gave a sold out reading at Dingledine and the following day twenty students were invited to attend a lecture
by Collins. I was in awe just being in his presence and trying to impress him with lord knows what sort of verbal bosh and pretentious tongue blather which made him role his eyes and question the veracity of our department.

In the circle (english majors form circles EVERYWHERE they go) there was one lady I had never seen before. She was wearing a mickey mouse shirt, glasses and had hazel bangs that slipped down the side of her face (which I would learn later on was a wig).

The lady smiled incessantly throughout the discourse of the lecture. She flirted with the poet laureate and made a joke about S &M that made Mr. Collins hackle with delight. At the end of the lecture she promptly gathered her folders and confidently strutted out of the room.


About a week later I was in another classroom (with desks seemingly arranged like crop-circles) when I inquired to Shannon Moore if she knew the origins of this affable creature who felt so comfortable cracking sado-masochist jibes with Billy Collins.

"Her name's Tricia." Shannon said. "She's a grad student and teaches at ICC."

It turned out that Tricia was going through chemotherapy for a lump she discovered late last autumn. Her hair was fake; she wore glasses so that no one would suspect that the streaking brows a top her nutmeg eyes were penciled in and that chemotherapy had ruthlessly stripped her every patch of her hair on her body, like brown bristles sprinkling off a dead-alley evergreen several weeks after the joyous holiday has past.

By the time Tricia was diagnosed with cancer I had already had my fair share of the disease stain the blood-lining of my familily genes. In less than five years I lost two grandparents, a cousin and my father. The last father to son activity I performed with the old man was helping him take a shit, lowering his boxers and wiping the ass of my father before two days before he died.

There's many things I hate in life (rich bradley kids from Northshore 'burbs, my ex-girlfriend, AIDS, poverty, academic dross-n-excess, financial destitution, Dr. Gorin, Illinois Public school systems in general) and Cancer ranks right up there, and, pardon my candor, but FUCK YOU twatty Georgie W. for not possessing the elementary social insight to diagnose CANCER in itself as a weapon of mass destruction. There, I said it mister president, Fuck you. Your troops are haggard and on there deathbed here at home, chief and you manipulate biblical passages for your own global naivete. In the immortal words of Greg Brown "I have my hand on my heart but I don't know what for." I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!

To the best of my knowledge Tricia was never as truculent as I am towards the disease that blasted the cells of fifteen percent of my family from me over the past half-decade. In fact, what makes Tricia my hero is that she conquered the disease in the same manner in which she conquered the heart of the US poet laureate that one spring morning:with charm and laughter.

The local paper did an account on Tricia this morning and showed a Christmas card of her and her family smiling. Tricia is sporting the infamous chemotherapy-inspired Sinead O'Conner doo while her three children and husband are each wearing a sort of nylon over their heads, pretending to be bald as well.

"Merry Christmas!" the card said, "And a Happy New Hair!"

*

Last semester Tricia stopped me after a Screenwriting class to congratulate me for a local writing award I had won. It was my first encounter with her tete-a-tete. Ironically the story that I sold was about my father who had died from a disease she was all too familiar with.

What happened next was weird. She just wanted to talk about my story and all I wanted to do was thank her for surviving. She smiled and acted like the twelve months of enervating chemo treatments were no big deal.

"When you have kids its just something you do. You survive."

She was wearing her wig, the same wig she had on the first time I had spotted her flirting with Billy Collins. In the article this morning she talked about loosing her physical identity, but never loosing her sense of humor."

"Look," She told the local Urinal Jar (Journal Star) reporter. "I thought to myself, If I'm going to go through this experiment, I might as well laugh my ass off."

*

The last time I saw Trish was about a month ago. We were walking opposite directions. A woman with scruff short hair was power walking on the sidewalk opposite from me. She hollered out my name and I had no clue who it was (I thought it was a lesbian at first)= to my dismay it was Trish.

"Can you believe it--MY HAIR IS COMING BACK!!!!"

"So it's gone?" I inquired. "The cancer is gone?"

"As far as I know." She responded. She went on to talk about her screen play (80 pages!!!) how BU had hired her to teach two classes this pending autumn. When I asked her again about the venom that momentarily rented the inside her body, she just laughed, referenced her kids and again, insinuated, that surviving is just something you do. You live and laugh as much as possible through this process of life--through the art of living.

I tried telling Trish just how much her survival meant to me that afternoon. She blushed it off and I hugged her goodbye, told her that I was proud of her. That she was my hero for conquering the disease that took my old man so suddenly three years ago.

Her shock of short hair looks like golden wheat atop her head and (using her own humor) Trish, you really were the sexiest lesbian I've ever seen that day (with the exception of late night hi-channeled adult quality viewing, of course....hehehe).

What Trish doesn't know is, after our last encountered, I cried. An avalanche of tears spilled from my sockets. True I was missing my dad, pissed off that he had died before he ever had the opportunity to escort one of his daughters down the aisle; pissed off that he had died while his only son and first born was engaged in a rather hedonistic and unhealthy lifestyle.

But mostly the reason I shuffled tears away from my cheekbones that afternoon has to do with beauty. Beauty in its most true and unadulterated form seems to sometimes involve an intersection of suffering, glory, resilience, laughter. What I saw that day, gazing at Trisha's back confidently power walking down Cooper as she gradually dissipated was simply a person who had accepted the "test" they were for some horrible, inexplicably given and had impeccably passed it with multiple plus signs following the first upper-case vowel.

Most notorious writers can't do this. For a long time I hid. I hid behind the blonde that was coddled in my right palm and the beer that was grasped in my left. I hid behind a plume of arid, cancer-friendly cigarette smoke. I hid behind prose so bloated it must be mistaken for splashes of genius 'less it be uncloaked for the elementary ink-drops that it truly was.

For a long time I hid. The Dragon firing up my cigar. The lizard pouring me another round. Mara telling me that the girl who just rightfully dropped my ass and has deemed me a 'creep' was a bitch-to-begin anyway before I cozen her into a kegstand and wet-t contest.

What I saw in Trish was a human being who accepted what life/God had given her and laughed, joyous streams of laughter in response.

Attagirl, Trish! Atta fuckin' girl!

Dust yerself off and try again...

All semester long there was Maggie; the fair skinned doe-eyed wild irish haired lass who sits next to me in irascible Doctor Gorin Soc for inane masochists. All semester long there was her--the beautiful fair-foreheaded goddess (she's like, twenty times more intelligent than I am!). Maggie who said the word 'Quarks' the first day of class. Maggie who dreams of taking her father to Ireland before he dies. Maggie who looks like a snow angel when she blushes, the folds of her smile creasing into the avenue of her lips; Maggie who loves the same state Park I trek to every season for spiritual nourishiment. Maggie whose favorite book is Jane Eyre which, after hearing her tithed confession (shhhh! don't tell her) I read for the first time. Maggie who gave me her phone number and then disappeared for a week and then wanted nothing to do with me. Maggie who either looks at me like she is totally in love or like she just miscarried every time we chat. Maggie who looks sexy in her spectacles. Maggie who inexplicably removed me from her facebook. Maggie who quite possibly, was the creative catalyst behind the best short story I have ever written (ibid see 'The Sail' publication pending and Miss Schutz, if you ever read this, that story belongs to you, so SMILE!) which is saying alot because I fucking write all the time, Maggie who I told my sister all about when I was drunk during the Illinois game. Maggie who I freaked out over because after I met her I felt that we had some weird connection. Maggie who works as a check out girl in ghetto Sav-a-lot of all fucking places. Maggie whose eyes look like lunar satellites every time they blink above the gentle pasture of her prominent cheekbones. Maggie who, I really believe this, is going to rock the world someday--a young woman who says so much simply by staring into the constellation of your forehead and offering the world a terse grin.

All semester long there was Maggie. The joy, the horrible awkwardness, the initial shock when I groped her pallid limb inside Jesters coffee and she said that she was in no particular hurry to get back to her dorm.

All semester long there was Maggie, beautiful, brilliant, wild-eyed erudite Maggie.

And tonight there was someone else.

And there were kisses, beautiful sweet kisses, the dew of spring, the awakenning of youth, the moment of oneness, feeling her body ache in the dark and wondering where she has been all this time.

In this way we are wise

Butt-ass exhausted. Working all the F**king time. I get off work at six am, get a few hours rest, clock back on at nine am, work on and off until 3, come in tomorrow at four, work til midnight, take a three hour hiatus, back on at noon saturday...all just tryin' to get a lil' bread in my jar......

wish I had a warm body to hold....

He who knows not how to hide....

...knows not how to love, so the adage goes. Went through four discrete drafts of my novel today, sifting through 1500 pages, four years of slapping shapes and milking metaphores. I'm exhausted. Twelve hour work day which because of pay crunches, I'm only paid for eight and a half.....


Brilliant writing buddy of mine found my blogg. He asked to remain faceless. Here's what he had to say:

Sir David--

Did something I've been meaning to do since NewYears. Recall our conversation with Dr.______,bedfellow of ____ the Plum Persian. Doctor insisted, rather insistently, that Kurt Vonnegut had recently checked out. You and I looked askance. Surely such news would have come to our attention. No, no, saidDoc, a bit dismissively, he's smoked. Are you sure you're not over extending your grasp Doctor? I mean,look, a guy needs a rubber glove in the ass and I'm sure you're just the man for the job. But perhaps you've strayed from your domain on this one. No, no,Kurt Vonnegut is dead, you ninnies. You are piddly writers. I am a medical doctor. You're degree is in abstraction, binge-drinking, mental masturbation. Mine is in medicine, in self-satisfaction. You two will stumble home tonight to toss off in a stack of wrinkled porn right about the time I'm mounting this plum Persian babe all knockered-up on Apple Martinis. Now, do as the good Doctor says and take yourmedicine, boys. I am right. He is dead.

Kurt Vonnegut is an 83-year old this year, and arather sprightly one at that.

Also, I checked out your blog. What a gig. It's the only blog I've ever intentionally read. Your fan base is impressive, though frankly, I'm worried, I'm worried for my life. I came upon the Dave Eggers story--well told, if you'll oblige some simpering. But oh the responses it illicited. I've heard about these blogging types. They're home-bodies,night-dwellers, tomb-raiders; they're wickens, they're patrons of dark lands with mystical powers. They take drugs, they have strange piercings. They have misinterpreted your yarn. They have bu-fooed context,and they have wished me ill-will. They have cursed me. Help me, David, please, to redeem my good standing in the universe. Tell them all that I have amended myself. Tell them of my support for your craft, my unflappable loyalty, my respect for all life and art. Tell them of my pathos, of my commingling with the needy. Tell them of my passiveness--I attended anti-war rallies in three states, albeit inadvertently. But a fine track record nonetheless. Tell them I'm a nature boy. Tell them I've sufferedfor my phone prank. And yes, tell them I have indeedheard of Karma. Tell them Karma recently visited andleft a raging case of ass herpes. I have repented.Tell them. Please. No more bad blogger Karma issued out of misconstrued context. The ass herpes hurts, somuch so I'm reduced to writing this email standing up.Bad bloggers, bad, bad bloggers.

Blogger be good, be good to me my babies. Love and peace to all of God's creatures unless you're and atheist then I love you too and good luck to the Muslims and people in India and I hope you all have enough rice for the winter and good toilets because cleanliness is next to godliness and that counts for you atheists too,

signed

??????????????

Blog Fog

What's been goin on...

* Month of March: In like a Lion, out with a hangover.

*New Wheels--No insurance, no problem.

* Who left the thong on my desk in the library???? (very funny guys! Hahaha. Aprils fool!)

* Found out that b/c I pay so much for school I'm eligible for Food stamps (What!?! I work ALL the time!!!!!!!!)

*Tryin' to be cognizant about my health without making myself and everyone around me feel like a total uptight anal wad.

* All I want to do is sit on my ass and write all the time!

* Biggest graduation party known to mankind planned end of May. It's for myself and my sister whose graduating from law school. My Uncle just splurged on this halycon patch of Illinois soil so the party will entail camp out and keg, requisite late spring bon fire, solitude, fishing canoeing....ahhhhhh!!!!

* Told my prof. that I'd have a copy of my 700 page novel finished and buffed by MAY 13th!!!!

*Biggest Lit-week on campus--two writers, release of new journal (I have three pieces!!!) followed by poetry reading and awards banquet. In a conciliatory gesture, I invited moma bear to awards banquet.

*Go Illini! Wait....

Exam from Hell on monday morning. It's a soc. 100 class but the prof. is driving us all nucking futs. see here: http://www.ratemyprofessor.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=95003

* It's spring which means I'm in love....